Insomnia has begun to really kick in for me on this home stretch of pregnancy. The combination of waking up every two hours to use the bathroom and being kicked in the ribs throughout the night (it’s okay, Bug… I’d rather you move too much than too little!) has made for some rough nights of sleep. Some nights it’s just better to throw in the

My cupboards are generally stocked with homemade, canned marinara sauce. It makes my life sooooo much easier on busy nights to pop open a jar, throw it in with some pasta and call it dinner. The marinara sauce I make is also great on pizzas, which we have about once a week. It takes time and love, but pays off big time come winter. The

The first frost of the season waits for no one! I can’t use grad school as an excuse to delay the coming cold season, so I’ve been spending some early mornings and late evenings in the kitchen processing tomatoes. When I don’t have time to make a big batch of sauce, I am canning them simply on their own. Canned tomatoes in their own sauce

Fall is the season of preserving and it’s high time I start sharing what’s been simmering in my canning pot. We can’t seem to have enough jars of applesauce in our cupboard, so I’ve been cooking up batches for the past couple weeks. It’s a great snack, breakfast, and dinner side dish. Applesauce is also fairly simple and easy to can. You can use almost

I just returned from a blissful week in New England where I attended one of the sweetest weddings ever. We flew from one Portland (Oregon) to another Portland (Maine) and somehow the world did not spontaneously combust. Our friends getting married, Dan and Emily, gave us a great reason to visit this part of the country. Portland, Maine, can be summed up in one word:

Marmalade is similar to jam in texture, but typically they include some amount of fruit peel. In this case, I made a delicious batch of strawberry-lemon marmalade or, as my friend Behak described it, strawberry-lemonade in a jar. It tastes like I canned summer and I can’t wait to pop these suckers open in January when I’ve forgotten what the sun feels like. The original

Most years I completely miss strawberry season. It comes so early for us here in the Pacific Northwest that it is barely, sort-of-consistently-sunny when they are ripe. And after about three weeks, they are all but gone for the year. This year, however, I stayed organized enough to stay on top of the harvest season. I called around to several local farms offering u-pick berries

In the glut of summer tomatoes, I put up several dozen cans of marinara sauce and whole tomatoes. When winter sets in though I tend to forget about them quietly waiting on my shelves. I just adjust to knowing tomatoes do not grow in winter, so I plan meals using seasonally available ingredients for the most part instead. Seed catalogs pouring into the mailbox are

Class is in full swing at the Urban Farm, but there is still more produce than 68 students can handle. The first week of class I came home with another, somewhat smaller, bucket of tomatoes. I’m not really hurting for marinara sauce anymore and we are pretty stocked on ketchup. I decided it would be best to just simply can these guys as-is. Canning tomatoes

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Hello homesteader! I'm Renee Wilkinson and this is where I've chronicled my adventures in homesteading since 2007. Here you will find 1,000+posts on modern homestead projects, edible landscape design and the occasional life update. Read More…